Introducing Kohinoor Arabic

Please welcome the sixth member of our flagship typeface, the Kohinoor Multiscript

Kohinoor Arabic is the second Arabic-script typeface from the Indian Type Foundry; our first was Diodrum Arabic, which we released earlier this year. This is also the sixth member of Kohinoor Multiscript, the very first of our super families. Over the past few years, we published variants of the Kohinoor design for the Latin script, as well as for Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Tamil. Kohinoor harmoniously translates a single aesthetic across each component script.

We started the Kohinoor project with the goal of supporting all 11 of India’s official writing systems, and we’re well on our way to meeting that. Taken together, all of our Kohinoor fonts currently support hundreds of languages, natively spoken by more than two billion people. Kohinoor is an ideal choice for text-heavy multilingual projects, including applications in the areas of corporate design; editorial design; electronic-embedding in apps; navigation and signage systems; product instruction manuals; television subtitling; and UI/UX. Kohinoor Arabic offers a similar colour to that present in text set with any of our other of Kohinoor script variants.

To describe Kohinoor Arabic in ‘Latin’ terminology, its letterforms are sans serif. Like the other Kohinoor variants, Kohinoor Arabic comes in five styles, ranging in weight from Light to Bold. Kohinoor Arabic was designed by Bahman Eslami, who is also responsible for our earlier Diodrum Arabic design, as well as the award-winning Harir typeface for Typotheque. Eslami is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, and he originally hails from Iran.

Thanks to its clear appearance, Kohinoor Arabic is easy to work with and inviting to read. Its letterforms are drawn in a Naskh style. Since this is the style used most often in today’s digital Arabic-language typesetting, we’re calling the family Kohinoor ‘Arabic’. Nevertheless, the fonts include all of the glyphs necessary for setting the Persian and Urdu languages – Urdu is one of India’s official languages, after all. We hope Kohinoor Arabic appeals to all users of the Arabic script, no matter where they are in the world they are, or what language they speak.

The counters in Kohinoor Arabic’s letters are large and open, placing an emphasis on the middle sections of a line of text. This makes Kohinoor Arabic appear friendly and more legible, too. The shapes of the vowel marks are not fussy. The letterforms’ strokes are low-contrast; however, as in the other Kohinoor families, there is still some stroke modulation. This is visible most often at the junctures of two strokes, and it keeps the typographic color from getting too dark. Many of Kohinoor Arabic’s strokes begin or end with lightly-sheared lines. These subtle angles add a trace of the calligrapher’s hand back into the generally-static language of sans serif types. The same may be said for the design’s Arabic-script dots and other marks.